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Is There Such A Thing As A Final Cut?
heidi writes "There's an insightful article over at CNN's entertainment section about the tinkering of recent cultural history. Apparently, there is no such thing as a final draft any more, and author Todd Leopold does a great job of showing how this is revisionist history at its, well, oddest. Aside from the many examples he cites, such as the 'new' Capote novel and the changing of Star Wars to show that Greedo shot first, i can think of the 'new' Camus novel that i read a few years ago and the way that The Wizard of Oz had the 'ding dong the witch is dead' song edited out. In an era where our entertainment has come to define us and to fill, however (un)completely, the spiritual void that we inherited from the Boomers, messing with our stories isn't necessarily a positive thing, creative genius aside."
I recognize all of these words individually, but strung together like this they make absolutely no sense.
(oh, and Han shot first...in bed.)
Mox
"Movies are never finished, only abandoned."
It's just not possible to get a movie -- or any artistic work, whether we're talking serious art or pop culture -- to the state where it's absolutely, 100% perfect. There's always some fine tuning, some tweaking, and at some point you have to say "That's it, we're done." It's not completely bug-free, but you've fixed all the big problems and you've gotta ship it sometime.
But with re-releases, DVDs, special screenings, etc. (and sufficient funding), people have the opportunity to go back and do a director's cut, or release two versions of a film (one short enough for theaters, one for people who can hit "pause" and take a bathroom break in the middle), or go back and fix that embarrasment of a first novel that you wrote when you were young and didn't understand the craft of writing as well as you do now.
Is this good or bad? I think it's neither. It's a tool. It can be used well, or used poorly. Sure, Lucas can go back and revise history so Greedo shoots first, but he can also go back and clean up the lousy compositing in the Rancor pit, fix the transparency in the Hoth battle sequences, etc.
"Ding, dong, the witch is dead" was edited out of The Wizard of Oz? I don't get it. Why?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Well, there was that one Pink Floyd album released after The Wall...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
The Louvre announced that it was lowering the bustline of the Mona Lisa to attract more visitors.
How prophetic Orwell was...
Unfortunately with political correctness becoming the norm, I don't see things like this not happening. Anti smoking advocates already scream if a movie shows a "good guy" smoking. How hard would it be to start protesting old movies that contain positive images of smoking?
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
And there's the real victim of where we seem to be headed with intellectual property: our cultural history.
Picture the broadcast flag, coupled with on-demand movies. Toss in changes of the medium du jour crippled with mostly effective DRM, and you're losing history left and right. There's a new release of, say, E.T. on Blu-Ray. Everyone (not literally everyone, of course, but you get the idea) replaces their old, worn-out VHS (or Beta, in the case of my parents) tapes. Now there's very little evidence that there were ever guns in the movie.
Or pay-per-view/on demand becomes the common way of watching movies. The broadcast flag prevents keeping a copy, of course. So all you'll ever be able to see is the latest version of the movie. Hell, look at Dumbo: can you even buy a copy of the movie that still has the crows singing? They certainly don't show it on television.
Or how about Aladdin? I can't be the only person who remembers the opening song's lyric containing a line about cutting off your hand for stealing a loaf of bread. But good luck proving that it ever even existed - to the best of my knowledge, that didn't even make into the first release of the movie to stores, much less subsequent ones.
The more consumers lose control of the media they consume - not being able to make/keep copies, being forced into a subscription model of media delivery - the more this is going to happen. We've got the technical capacity right now to preserve a closer-to-perfect record of our culture than has ever existed in human history, and we're wasting it. It's being lost to political correctness, revisionist history, and George Lucas.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Back in the day (about 200 years ago) a composer like Beethoven revised his symphonies between performances. The idea of having a "final cut" probably grew out of the use of mass production to make copies. Given the Internet, we will probably see far fewer "final cuts" in the future.
Of course Han shot first. This whole "Greedo shot first" is nothing more than the opinion of George Lucas.
So what if he wrote the story? After he tells the story to me, it exists in my brain. The version in my brain is under my control. It ends however I want it to end.
Any well-told work transcends its author. To limit your interpretations of it to those in the mind of the author is to accept an outright blasphemous form of mental slavery.
A free mind has many voices, both inner and outer, and the author of a work of art is just one more outer voice.
Do not surrender your power.
Let's see if i can remember a few things from the history class on the old testament i took in college. The mistranslation of "Reed Sea" into "Red Sea." There's a decent amount of evidence that Yahweh had a wife at one point but she got edited out later. There was at least one point where stuff was codified and a lot of stories, which were just as "valid" as the ones where were kept, were dropped for political or cultural reasons. It's been about six years since i took the class, but i can tell you for sure that anyone who thinks the bible hasn't ever changed is either a fundamentalist (and therefore willing to completly ignore historical evidence) or delusional.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
"Sure, Lucas can go back and revise history so Greedo shoots first<snip>"
You bet, that is Lucas' prerogative. You know what really grinds my gears, though? The fact that after Lucas does his new cut, the old ones are never to see the light of day. Outside of bootlegs, we will never see Greedo shoot first on DVD, or E.T. chased by gun toting F.B.I. agents. They will be stuck on a crappy medium (VHS) until those tapes stop working. Who even knows if the original 35mm prints are still saved.
This leads to the lapses in history. I couldn't believe when I watched a show about how ground breaking the special effects in Star Wars were back in 1977 and all the clips were from the re-release! They even played the clip with the Death Star exploding with the new enegery ring! Ughhhh.... That wasn't 1977, that was a couple of years ago.
Plus, it is only going to get worse. As the lack of creativity increases in Hollywood, you'll see more re-releases and remakes where the original is left in a dusty back-lot room someplace.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Sir, I tip my hat to your karma whoring abilities.
/.ers have never heard a stump speech so they don't clue in.
/.ers agree with.
Let's review this post:
The title and hook use a trendy geek term "five nines" to make a sweeping and unsubstantiated generalization.
The post is arranged as a series of bullets, rather than actual ideas. This way placid mods aren't compelled to think about what's being written.
The bullets moan about the condition of society, which 99.999% of people agree with, and suggest that "change is good," which 99.999% of people also agree with. It sounds like a stump speech, but most
And he wraps it up by saying he hates IP, which 99.999% of
None of it actually makes any sense but that doesn't matter to a karma whore!
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Shakespeare continually rewrote his plays. He adapted them for different actors and different venues, and abridged them in various different ways depending on the tastes of the times. He sometimes had to censor his texts when the rules demanded changes.
I'm not sure what legend's source for "He didn't even bother to cross out anything as he wrote" is, but it's unfounded. No original Shakespeare manuscripts exist in his own hand.
Most of his plays have several different versions, and when you go to perform one you have to pick which one you want to take as your base text. This is made harder by the fact that many of these these folios and quartos are reconstructions by the actors themselves, some of which are mistaken, but others changes represent times when Shakespeare himself edited the text.
Hamlet, for example, is very different between the First Folio and Second Quarto editions. When Kenneth Branagh combined the two to make his movie, he was doing a Hamlet which Shakespeare himself probably never saw. He'd rewritten the play, and Branagh had combined two rewrites. Which one Shakespeare would have preferred is up for debate, but it certainly shows that Shakespeare did revisit his plays.
I suspect legend's source is the fact that Shakespare was one prolific son of a bitch; he was cranking out works of genius almost faster than you could copy the things. He'd put out several plays a year at times. There are internal contradictions in the text that suggest that Shakespeare didn't revise quite as many times as he should have.
And yes, IAASS (I Am A Shakespeare Scholar). I'm directing Merry Wives of Windsor right now, a play which certainly could have used a few more editing passes.